1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to a medicine container and, in particular, to a medicine container applied with an electronic medicine box.
2. Related Art
The advancement of technology improves the people's life and diet, but makes the modern human beings be much troubled by the diseases of civilization, such as chronic diseases including the hypertension, cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes or the like; or mental illnesses including the depressive illness, bipolar disorder or the like. The treatments for these diseases need to rely on the long-term medicine treatment. Although the technology is getting more and more advanced than the prior art and the digitized era has come, the conditions of prescription drug misuse still come out one after the other.
In the current hospital administration condition, after the patient goes to the hospital or clinic for the consultation, the patient receives several days of medicines, which are usually placed in a medicine bag, and the hospital or clinic staff records the medication information, such as the time interval and the number of the medications, on the medicine bag. The patient has to take the medicines from the medicine bag according to the doctor's advice. Of course, the busy office workers or elderly persons tend to forget to take the medicine, or forget which medicines should be taken. In view of this, some manufacturers have produced medicine boxes to assist in solving the above-mentioned problem and make the patient dispense the medicines according to the dosage for each day and each time when the patient still remembers the information. Then, the patient only has to take the medicines in order. However, the above-mentioned method still needs the patient to remember the information. In the condition where the medicine types are diversified and the dosages may vary in every medication, this procedure provides the extremely high risk of medication error for the elderly persons or the critically ill patients.
The typical medicine box only provides the function for the user to place the medicines. Even if some medicine boxes allow the user to mark an easy record on the container to record the common period to take medicines, such as before or after breakfast, lunch and dinner, there are considerable risks to cause the prescription drug misuse. For example, since the medicines are dispensed by the non-expert, either the family member, the caregiver or the patient himself or herself, at home, the patient may take wrong medicines. More particularly, upon medication, the patient cannot obtain the reference information to clearly know whether the medication is correct or not. Thus, it is further difficult to decrease the risk of medication error. Generally speaking, the most frequently seen medication error at present includes taking the incorrect medicine, taking the medicine at the incorrect time, forgetting to take which kind of medicine, or the like, and the current industry does not provide the better solution.
Therefore, it is an important subject to provide a medicine container, which can decrease the opportunity of dispensing the medicines by non-experts, can assist in solving the medicine taking problem, can precisely record the medication reference information, can remind the patient to take the medicine or remind the doctor's advice of the patient at the suitable time, and can solve the problem of the high medication error at present.